One-pot, sustainable and room temperature synthesis of graphene oxide-impregnated iron-based metal-organic framework

Despite being a most popular and widely used therapy, chemotherapy has various challenges related to its effective and sustainable utilization in cancer therapeutics. These challenges canbe overcome via inorganic nanomaterials-assisted drug delivery systems (DDS). In this work, a sustainable, facile, and one-pot synthesis approach is adapted for the preparation of graphene oxide (GO)-impregnated Fe-based metal-organic frameworks (GO/MIL-100(Fe)(Gw-MF) as doxorubicin (DOX) nanocarriers via the HF free route. The DOX loading efficiency of these nanocarriers was studied for Gw-MF at a fixed drug concentration and with varying DOX masses with respect to the carrier (w/w). Amongst various Gw-MF nanocarriers, G0.5-MF has shown superior loading efficiency of 29.91 ± 1.49% for a 1 w/w ratio of DOX. The DOX released pattern of the G0.5-MF nanocarrier was more regulated in nature which may improve the therapeutic efficacy. The release behavior of G0.5-MF was further studied using kinetic modeling. in-vitro cytotoxicity studies of G0.5-MF showed higher toxicity to cancer cells (A549) without showing noticeable toxicity for normal cells (HEK293). Overall, the outcome of this work highlighted the room temperature sustainable synthesis of Gw-MF nanocarriers and their role in DOX loading, release, and cytotoxicity performance towards cancer cells in the field of DDS.